Inspired by Latour’s (2005a) notion of matters of concern and M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit III as a representation
of the Poincaré Disk, this study follows how an S&OP process was fabricated in a large Swedish
manufacturing company. The study claims that when actors are fabricating the S&OP process, local actors
create emergent, ongoing and multiple matters of concern around it. The group demand chain, the actor
who is responsible for guiding the implementation of the process, delegates the attempts to close these
matters of concern to local actors located in separate times and spaces. As a result, constituents of the
S&OP process are dispersed in diverse local times and spaces rather than being coordinated in a single time
and space by the group demand chain. Accounting is a set of matters of concern.
The S&OP process and its purpose of integration come from an “absolute nothingness” – its minimal
configuration ‐ because actors refer to them in their absences. They need to be re‐presented. The minimal
configuration of the S&OP process creates a working time/space where diverse actors are engaged to create
emergent properties of the S&OP process and new possibilities of integration. Consequently, as new matters
of concern are constantly created by actors, integration on the demand chain becomes uncertain because
actors are always creating new possibilities to move towards integration but will never arrive at the
destination of integration. The S&OP process and integration thus go back to the “absolute nothingness”
because as matters of concern they have no edge. To integrate is thus to postpone integration. In‐between
stands the constituents of the S&OP process and possibilities of integration dispersed in diverse times and
spaces. This means from this “absolute nothingness” lays the “geometry exactitude” of the managerial
technology. Accounting is a Poincaré Disk. Therefore accounting not only creates a presence what are
absent but also initiates a working time/space where actors can bring heterogeneous problematisation
upon itself. The impossibility of representation brings about possibility of heterogeneous
representational practices. Accounting makes the transition possible by artificially blurring the
distinction between absence and presence.